cultural dislocation Quotes

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

I have written about cultural dislocation, and I understand the corrosive effect of diminished expectations.

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.

After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

At this moment, my soul is in Lebanon, my heart in Paris, and my body in New York.

As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.

And I, as I lived, in an alien landWill die a slave and an orphan.

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

The idea of feeling displaced, and never feeling safe anywhere in the world, where you always feel like you're safer if you're over there, is not just my experience. If you went to Iran today or an Iranian came to America today, or the fact that there are bombs exploding everywhere, there's just a tremendous sense of fear and feeling a desire for security.

Exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.

...expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before thewind.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.

An 18th century brain, in a 21st century head.